Keep Up The Good Work, Dub!

Ol' Dub couldn't sink any faster in the polls than if he stuffed his pockets with lead weights. It couldn't happen to a nicer dunce. Everything is coming unstuck. How do we spell impeachment, boys and girls? If William F. Buckley hisself and Bill No-Spin are calling for a pullout, ol' Dub is gonna have to run REAL hard to get out in front of this parade. The latest Zogby poll (in cooperation with LeMoyne College) shows that the majority (more than 70%) of troops on the ground want to be out of Iraq within the year. A third of those wanting out, want out of Iraq yesterday! The Crawford "Ranch" is gonna look more inviting than ever to ol' Stay The Course Dub. So much brush to clear and so few brain cells. If this is (fair & balanced) gleeful anticipation, so be it.

[x Salon]
Grading on a curve in Iraq
By Tim Grieve

Pentagon auditors have declared potentially excessive or unjustified more than $250 million in charges Halliburton has made under a no-bid contract in Iraq. As the New York Times reports today, the Army is going to pay almost all of those charges anyway. A spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers explains: "The contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement."

It's a standard the Bush administration might like to apply to itself. Conditions improved in Iraq over the weekend as the country seemed to pull back from the brink of civil war. Sunnis are expressing a greater interest in returning to talks over the formation of a government, and the Associated Press says that -- except for the small matter of a mortar attack that killed four and wounded 16 -- Baghdad was "generally peaceful" Monday after four days of widespread violence.

But all this means is that Iraqis and the U.S. troops among them may be starting to get back to where they were before the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra last week -- which is to say, a long way from where the administration predicted they'd be. Nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and maybe 10 times as many Iraqis have died in the war so far; insurgents appear free to attack almost at will; and basic services remain below preinvasion standards. The president says that U.S. troops will come home as Iraqi security forces stand up, but there seems to be reverse progress on that front. The administration used to boast that one Iraqi battalion was able to function without U.S. support; last week, it downgraded the ranking of even that battalion, meaning that there is currently not a single Iraqi battalion that the Pentagon deems capable of fighting on its own.

Fifty-five percent of the American public now believes that it was a mistake to go to war, and even some of the folks at Fox News have become openly critical of the president's stay-the-course strategy. Bill O'Reilly, who used to call advocates of a troop withdrawal "pinheads," said last week that it's time to get U.S. troops out of Iraq "as fast as humanly possible." And Fox News commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said over the weekend that the United States has "not had a serious three-year effort to fight a war in Iraq as opposed to laying the preconditions for getting out."

Maybe "good enough for government work" works for Halliburton. But as the 2006 elections approach, the president and his party may be discovering that even Americans inclined to support them expect something more when lives are at stake.

Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon.com. The magazine is based in San Francisco. Grieve's blog — War Room — is a political commentary site.

Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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More O'Them Damn Pitchers!

Visual materials are hot lately. This blog isn't about to be left in the dust by Danish newspapers or anyone else. Today, we have not one, but three pitchers that are bound to offend someone. If this is (fair & balanced) scurrilous art, so be it.

The first image (all clickable to enlarge) was supplied by my Cheesehead friend (Tom Terrific) and fellow hater of Dub and his minions:



After that pause that refreshed, Tom Tomorrow had a winner last week:



Copyright © 2006 Salon

Followed by this week's strip by Tom Tomorrow:



Copyright © 2006 Salon

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Why I Have A Scantron Gimme Cap

This piece by Professors Cohen and Rosenzweig took me back to my days at the Collegium Excellens and before. In my first teaching gig at the Collegium Pro Populo in Illinois, I was called on the carpet by the Dean of Students in a Star Chamber proceeding that was inspired by some student complaints that my grading standards were too high. For the first time (1965), I heard that I needed to be more student-centered in my teaching. Translation: dumb it down and don't harm the students' self-image. As a result, I dropped essay exams like a hot potato. Ultimately, in grad school at Texas Technique, I answered an ad for volunteer instructors in the campus fishwrap. A doctoral student in psychology was running a study of the efficacy of multiple choice testing. The carrot was machine scored tests in the campus computer center. Drop off the scannable forms — known generically as Scantrons — on Monday and pick up the scoring reports on Tuesday. The scoring reports provided more than mere tallies of hits and misses. The psych grad student had formulated an array of item analysis reports using statistical tools beyond my arithmetical ken. I was the first teaching fellow in the history department to use this service. The department chair received a bill from the campus computer center for my use of computer time. Ultimately, the department added test scoring costs to the departmental budget. Multiple choice history exams became the norm at Texas Technique in the 1970s. My move to the Collegium Excellens from Texas Technique brought me to pursue computerized test scoring at the Collegium Excellens. At first, test scoring was done via the mainframe computer. Later, in the 1980s, the advent of the PC moved test scoring away from the mainframe to a test preparation, results analysis, and results reporting software product. I became so enamored of this software that I founded an e-mail newsletter that was hosted on a server at the University of Pennsylvania. I became involved consulting with the Scantron Corporation when that behemoth purchased the software company that I was supporting. As a reward for consulting with Scantron about the shift from a DOS-version to a Web version, I received a Scantron gimme cap. All of this changed for me (and my students) when a virtual friend on the Internet got me invited to serve as a AP Reader for the Educational Testing Service. Over the next several years, I was trained in the art of reading essays and assigning a defensible score to essays. I moved away from multiple choice tests during the last decade of my time in harness at the Collegium Excellens. If this is a (fair & balanced) avowal, so be it.

[x CHE]
No Computer Left Behind
By Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig

"I hate Scantron," one exasperated high-school student wrote on an online bulletin board earlier this year, referring to the ubiquitous multiple-choice forms covered with ovals, named for the corporation that has manufactured them since 1972. An older student replied: "Get used to seeing them. Colleges are all about Scantrons." Noting that it can take 30 minutes to grade an essay question, the older student explained, "That's why most instructors use Scantron, or at least multiple choice, for most of their tests."

But multiple-choice tests not only torment students; they also feature centrally in the increasingly vitriolic debate over standardized testing. Do they adequately measure student learning? Do they simply force teachers to "teach to the test"? In our own discipline of history, policy makers, teachers, and scholars have begun to debate whether history should be added to the list of subjects tested in the schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. And we can safely predict that when the National Assessment of Educational Progress history tests are given again this year, we will see a new round of hand-wringing over "why students don't know any history." Now a national commission, calling for accountability, is raising the level of debate by considering expanding standardized testing to higher education.

Such student complaints and adult debates about standardized tests could soon become obsolete — if, as we argue, the digital technology that allows students to share their grievances online undermines the very nature of multiple-choice exams. As the calculator forever altered mathematical education — eventually muscling its way into the test room when it became clear that long division had become a useless relic of the past — what if modern technology is about to make the format of these tests as quaint as a slide rule? What if students will have in their pockets a device that can rapidly and accurately answer, say, multiple-choice questions about history? Would teachers start to face a revolt from (already restive) students, who would wonder why they were being tested on their ability to answer something that they could quickly find out about on that magical device?

It turns out that most students already have such a device in their pockets, and to them it's less magical than mundane. It's called a cellphone. That pocket communicator is rapidly becoming a portal to other simultaneously remarkable and commonplace modern technologies that, at least in our field of history, will enable the devices to answer, with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy, the kinds of multiple-choice questions used in thousands of high-school and college history classes, as well as a good portion of the standardized tests that are used to assess whether the schools are properly "educating" our students. Those technological developments are likely to bring the multiple-choice test to the brink of obsolescence, mounting a substantial challenge to the presentation of history — and other disciplines — as a set of facts or one-sentence interpretations and to the rote learning that inevitably goes along with such an approach.

Surprisingly, multiple-choice testing is less than a century old. According to the psychologist Franz Samelson, the multiple-choice question made its first published appearance in 1915 in a "silent reading test" devised by Frederick J. Kelly, the director of the Training School at the State Normal School in Emporia, Kan. Kelly's innovation responded, in part, to growing complaints about the subjectivity of grading in standardized tests that had become increasingly common at the turn of the century. But equally important, he wanted to make tests cheaper and faster to grade. How could you administer mass standardized tests and establish "objective" test norms without some quick and easy method of grading? The need for easily scoreable exams became even more compelling two years later, when the United States entered World War I, and psychologists convinced military leaders that measuring the "intelligence" of almost two million soldiers would improve military efficiency.

In the mid-1920s, the College Board added multiple-choice questions to its SAT's, previously just a set of essay questions, and sealed the triumph of the new format. "The multiple-choice test — efficient, quantitative, capable of sampling wide areas of subject matter and easily generating data for complicated statistical analyses," Samelson writes, became "the symbol ... of American education." Along the way, the technologies of testing became more elaborate — moving from the scoring stencils devised around World War I to the IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine, which appeared in the late 1930s and could read pencil marks, to the Scantron forms and machines that are the bane of today's high-school and college students.

The IBM 805 and the Scantron were effective and widespread 20th-century technologies. But they pale in comparison to the power and ubiquity of two 21st-century technological developments that may change the debate over multiple-choice testing. The first is the World Wide Web — not only the largest record of human knowledge in the history of our species, but also the most open and available.

We can already hear the snickers from our colleagues: "You want to send students to the wilds of the Web to find the answers to exam questions?" Scholars in history (as well as in other fields) have generally viewed the state of knowledge on the Web with skepticism. In 2004 Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and also a historian, told The New York Times that a Google search of the Web "overwhelms you with too much information, much of which is hopelessly unreliable or beside the point. It's like looking for a lost ring in a vacuum bag. What you end up with mostly are bagel crumbs and dirt." Scholars like Botstein — used to the detailed analysis of individual documents for credibility and import — look in horror at the many Web pages with factual errors or outright fictions. Even if students could Google any topic they wanted from their cellphone, they would surely choose some of those errant Web pages, select some "bagel crumbs and dirt," and flunk their exams.

But what if, as in statistics, the extremes could cancel each other out, and the errors become swamped by the truth? Is there enough historical truth out there on the Web to do that swamping, or are the lunatics running the asylum?

Computer scientists have an optimistic answer for worried scholars. They argue that the enormous scale and linked nature of the Web make it possible for it to be "right" in the aggregate while sometimes very wrong on specific pages. The Web "has enticed millions of users to type in trillions of characters to create billions of Web pages of on average low-quality contents," write the computer scientists Rudi Cilibrasi and Paul Vitányi in a 2004 essay.Yet, they continue, "the sheer mass of the information available about almost every conceivable topic makes it likely that extremes will cancel and the majority or average is meaningful in a low-quality approximate sense." In other words, although the Web includes many poorly written and erroneous pages, taken as a whole the medium actually does quite a good job encoding meaningful data.

At the same time that the Web's openness allows anyone access, it also allows any machine connected to it to scan those billions of documents, which leads to the second development that puts multiple-choice tests in peril: the means to process and manipulate the Web to produce meaningful information or answer questions. Computer scientists have long dreamed of an adequately large corpus of text to subject to a variety of algorithms that could reveal underlying meaning and linkages. They now have that corpus, more than large enough to perform remarkable new feats through information theory.

For instance, Google researchers have demonstrated (but not yet released to the general public) a powerful method for creating "good enough" translations — not by understanding the grammar of each passage, but by rapidly scanning and comparing similar phrases on countless electronic documents in the original and second languages. Given large enough volumes of words in a variety of languages, machine processing can find parallel phrases and reduce any document into a series of word swaps. Where once it seemed necessary to have a human being aid in a computer's translating skills, or to teach that machine the basics of language, swift algorithms functioning on unimaginably large amounts of text suffice. Are such new computer translations as good as a skilled, bilingual human being? Of course not. Are they good enough to get the gist of a text? Absolutely. So good the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency increasingly rely on that kind of technology to scan, sort, and mine gargantuan amounts of text and communications (whether or not the rest of us like it).

As it turns out, "good enough" is precisely what multiple-choice exams are all about. Easy, mechanical grading is made possible by restricting possible answers, akin to a translator's receiving four possible translations for a sentence. Not only would those four possibilities make the work of the translator much easier, but a smart translator — even one with a novice understanding of the translated language — could home in on the correct answer by recognizing awkward (or proper) sounding pieces in each possible answer. By restricting the answers to certain possibilities, multiple-choice questions provide a circumscribed realm of information, where subtle clues in both the question and the few answers allow shrewd test takers to make helpful associations and rule out certain answers (for decades, test-preparation companies like Kaplan Inc. have made a good living teaching students that trick). The "gaming" of a question can occur even when the test taker doesn't know the correct answer and is not entirely familiar with the subject matter.

Are there algorithms that might identify connections between a multiple-choice question and the correct answer, thus providing a means of effectively mining those billions of words suddenly accessible free to everyone with an Internet connection — a group that already includes many people with cellphones? To test the ratio of accurate to inaccurate historical information on the Web and to pursue the idea that machine reasoning might, as with the new computational translation services, provide "good enough" answers to historical questions, one of us, Daniel, created a software agent called "H-Bot." On the Center for History and New Media Web site, we have a public beta test of that software that you can use to answer simple factual questions about history using natural language (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot). For instance, ask it, "Whenwas Nelson Mandela born?" It responds, "Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918." Although it has a fast mode that looks at "trusted sources" first (i.e., online encyclopedias and dictionaries), it can also use the entire Web to answer questions using algorithms drawn from computer science.

Suppose you want to know when Charles Lindbergh took his famous flight to Paris. Asking H-Bot "When did Charles Lindbergh fly to Paris?" would prompt the software (using its "pure" mode, which does not simply try to find a reliable encyclopedia entry) to query Google for Web pages that include the words "Charles Lindbergh," "flew," and "Paris." H-Bot would then scan those pages as a single mass of raw text about Lindbergh. It would search, in particular, for words that look like years (i.e., positive three- and four-digit numbers), and it would indeed find many instances of "1902" and "1974" (Lindbergh's birth and death years). But most of all, it would find a statistically indicative spike around "1927," the year that Lindbergh made his pioneering flight to Paris. By scanning and processing many Web sites — sites like the official Lindbergh Foundation site and the amateur enthusiast Ace Pilots site in the same breath — H-Bot would accurately answer the user's historical question, disregarding as statistical outliers the few sites that incorrectly state the year of his flight.

While simple statistical methods can process the raw material of the Web to answer basic historical questions, more involved algorithms can provide the answers to more complex questions. Using a theory called "normalized information distance," a special version of H-Bot programmed to take multiple-choice tests can tackle not only question-and-answer pairs similar to the Lindbergh question, but also questions from the NAEP U.S. history exam that supposedly invoke the higher-order processes of historical thinking, and that should be answerable only if you truly understand the subject matter and are able to reason about the past. For example, a 1994 NAEP question asked, "What is the purpose of the Bill of Rights?" It provided the following options:

(a) To say how much Americans should pay in taxes

(b) To protect freedoms like freedom of speech

(c) To describe the jobs of the President and Congress

(d) To make Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States

H-Bot cannot understand the principles of taxation, liberty, or the purviews of the executive and legislative branches. But it need not comprehend those concepts to respond correctly. Instead, to figure out the significance of the Bill of Rights, H-Bot found that Web pages on which the phrase "Bill of Rights" and the word "purpose" appear contain the words "freedom" and "speech" more often than words like "taxes," "President," or "Washington." (To be more precise, H-Bot's algorithms actually compared the normal frequency of those words on the Web with the frequency of those words on relevant pages.) H-Bot thus correctly surmised that the answer was (b).

We gave H-Bot that and dozens of other publicly available multiple-choice questions from the fourth-grade NAEP American-history exam, on which such questions composed about two-thirds of the total. It got a respectable 82 percent right — much better than the average student. Moreover, the experimental H-Bot is only a preliminary version programmed by a humble historian of science with help from a (very bright) high-school student, Simon Kornblith. Imagine how well it could do with financing and legions of math Ph.D.'s to attack problems on behalf of search-engine giants like Google.

Before we disdainfully dismiss H-Bot's test-taking prowess as a parlor gimmick, we need to remember that we have built a good deal of our educational system around such multiple-choice tests. They are ubiquitous even in college classrooms and are widely cited as evidence of national "ignorance" in history and other fields. Moreover, our attachment to these tests (as Frederick Kelly knew well) has more to do with economics and technology than with teaching and learning. "We use these tests," Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who teaches at Stanford University's School of Education, writes in The Journal of American History, "not because they are historically sound or because they predict future engagement with historical study, but because they can be read by machines that produce easy-to-read graphs and bar charts."

Moreover we should remember the resistance that accompanied the entry of the calculator into the exam room. Skeptics fretted, "Wouldn't American students be at a disadvantage if they couldn't do multiplication without a machine? Doesn't the ability to do such processes unassisted lead to a deeper understanding of mathematics itself?" But most people quickly realized that providing calculators to students freed them up to work on more complex and important aspects of mathematics, rather than worrying about memorizing multiplication tables.

The combination of the cellphone and the magnificent, if imperfect, collective creation of the Web with some relatively simple mathematical formulas has given us a free version of what our provost and historian, Peter Stearns, proposed to us a couple of years ago — the Cliolator, a play on the muse of history and the calculator. Stearns observed that many educators would resist the adoption of the Cliolator, as they had the calculator. But he also argued, rightly in our view, that it would improve history education by displacing the fetishizing of factual memorization.

Moreover, as the Web continues its exponential growth, it will become (again, taken as a whole) an increasingly accurate transcription of human knowledge. A basic principle of information theory is that the larger the corpus, the more accurately it encodes meaning over all and the more useful it is for data-mining applications. And consider what will happen to the quality of information on the Web after the completion of the vast initiatives of Google and others to digitize the high-caliber information in books.

By the time today's elementary-school students enter college, it will probably seem as odd to them to be forbidden to use digital devices like cellphones, connected to an Internet service like H-Bot, to find out when Nelson Mandela was born as it would be to tell students now that they can't use a calculator to do the routine arithmetic in an algebra equation. By providing much more than just an open-ended question, multiple-choice tests give students — and, perhaps more important in the future, their digital assistants — more than enough information to retrieve even a fairly sophisticated answer from the Web. The genie will be out of the bottle, and we will have to start thinking of more meaningful ways to assess historical knowledge or "ignorance."

At around the same time that Kelly was pioneering the multiple-choice test on the Kansas frontier, the educational psychologists J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, no doubt influenced by the same mania for testing that was sweeping the country, began a study of the "attainments" of history students in Texas. At the outset, they wrote, they surmised that they might, for example, assess students' "ability to understand present events in the light of the past," or their "skill in sifting and evaluating a mass of miscellaneous materials" and "constructing ... a straightforward and probable account," or their aptitude at providing "reflective and discriminating replies to 'thought questions' on a given historical situation." Bell and McCollum then noted a final possibility, that "historical ability may be taken as the readiness with which pupils answer questions revealing the range of their historical information," although "this is perhaps the narrowest, and ... the least important type of historical ability." But, they continued, "it is the one which is the most readily tested, and was, therefore, chosen for study in the present investigation." As Wineburg observes, "While perhaps the first instance, this was not the last in which ease of measurement — not priority of subject-matter understanding — determined the shape and contour of a research program."

Of course Bell and McCollum might have had an even easier time if they had gotten word of Kelly's innovations in testing. Instead they asked students, for example, to write down "the reason for the historic importance of each of 10 representative dates" (like 1789). That required them, to their disappointment, to give partial credit for answers, including some "evaluated quite arbitrarily." Very soon, however, their factualist approach would be married to the seemingly objective multiple-choice test, and historical understanding would be reduced to a filled-in bubble on a form.

Now that newer technology threatens the humble technology of the multiple-choice exam, we have an opportunity to return to some of the broader and deeper measures of understanding in history — and other subjects — that Bell and McCollum knew quite well before they and others rushed down the path that has led us and our students to Scantron purgatory. As Bell and McCollum knew (like students who complain about Scantrons), it takes considerably more time and effort to grade essay questions that, for example, measure a student's ability to synthesize historical sources into a complex narrative. But, as the Document Based Questions widely used in Advanced Placement history tests demonstrate, such exams are not incompatible with standardized, national measurements. They just take a little more time to grade. Indeed, the creators of the initial NAEP U.S. history examination worried that "one limitation of many traditional assessments is that they frequently present pieces of information or problems to be solved in isolation." Yet their response — placing related multiple-choice questions together in "theme blocks" while adding some short "constructed response" questions — only modestly addressed that problem.

Although we tend to believe that "new technology" always saves time and money, the marriage of the Web with the cellphone augurs the demise of the inexpensive technologies of multiple-choice tests and grading machines. But we will not be among the mourners at the funeral of the multiple-choice test. Such exams have fostered a school-based culture of rote memorization that has little to do with true learning. And the resources that it will take to offer and grade more complex and thoughtful exams pale in comparison to those being wasted on pointless approaches to measuring student comprehension. Politicians who insist on raising the "stakes" in standardized testing need to provide the funds for people rather than machines to do the grading. If we are going to continue to insist on having machines grade our students, then we should expect that they are going to insist on being able to answer exam questions using the machines in their pockets.

Daniel J. Cohen is an assistant professor of history and Roy Rosenzweig a professor of history at George Mason University. They are affiliated with the university's Center for History and New Media and are co-authors of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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RIP, Don Knotts

Don Knotts' obit included the fascinating trivia that he was in the cast of one of my favorite radio serials: "Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders." Don Knotts was funny. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

[x Associated Press]
Don Knotts, TV's Lovable Nerd, Dies at 81
By Jeremiah Marquez

LOS ANGELES — Don Knotts, the skinny, lovable nerd who kept generations of television audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show," has died. He was 81.

Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs "The Andy Griffith Show," and another Knotts hit, "Three's Company."

Unspecified health problems had forced him to cancel an appearance in his native Morgantown in August 2005.

The West Virginia-born actor's half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the Griffith show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmies.

The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series in TV history to bow out at the top: The others are "I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld." The 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and have spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.

As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.

Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn't mind being remembered that way.

His favorite episodes, he said, were "The Pickle Story," where Aunt Bea makes pickles no one can eat, and "Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.

"I can't sing. It makes me sad that I can't sing or dance well enough to be in a musical, but I'm just not talented in that way," he lamented. "It's one of my weaknesses."

Knotts appeared on six other television shows. In 1979, Knotts replaced Norman Fell on "Three's Company," playing the would-be swinger landlord to John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt.

Early in his TV career, he was one of the original cast members of "The Steve Allen Show," the comedy-variety show that ran from 1956-61. He was one of a group of memorable comics backing Allen that included Louis Nye,
Tom Poston and Bill "Jose Jimenez" Dana.

Knotts' G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. In most, he ends up the hero and gets the girl — a girl who can see through his nervousness to the heart of gold.

In the part-animated 1964 film "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.

When it was announced in 1998 that Jim Carrey would star in a "Limpet" remake, Knotts responded: "I'm just flattered that someone of Carrey's caliber is remaking something I did. Now, if someone else did Barney Fife, THAT would be different."

In the 1967 film "The Reluctant Astronaut," co-starring Leslie Nielsen, Knotts' father enrolls his wimpy son — operator of a Kiddieland rocket ride — in NASA's space program. Knotts poses as a famous astronaut to the joy of his parents and hometown but is eventually exposed for what he really is, a janitor so terrified of heights he refuses to ride an airplane.

In the 1969 film "The Love God?," he was a geeky bird-watcher who is duped into becoming publisher of a naughty men's magazine and then becomes a national sex symbol. Eventually, he comes to his senses, leaves the big city and marries the sweet girl next door.

He was among an army of comedians from Buster Keaton to Jonathan Winters to liven up the 1963 megacomedy "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." Other films include "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966); "The Shakiest Gun in the West," (1968); and a few Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang," (1974); "Gus," (1976); and "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo," (1977).

In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie "Pleasantville," playing a folksy television repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister into a TV sitcom past.

Knotts began his show biz career even before he graduated from high school, performing as a ventriloquist at local clubs and churches. He majored in speech at West Virginia University, then took off for the big city.

"I went to New York cold. On a $100 bill. Bummed a ride," he recalled in a visit to his hometown of Morgantown, where city officials renamed a street for him in 1998.

Within six months, Knotts had taken a job on a radio Western called "Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders," playing a wisecracking, know-it-all handyman. He stayed with it for five years, then came his series TV debut on "The Steve Allen Show."

He married Kay Metz in 1948, the year he graduated from college. The couple had two children before divorcing in 1969. Knotts later married, then divorced Lara Lee Szuchna.

In recent years, he said he had no plans to retire, traveling with theater productions and appearing in print and TV ads for Kodiak pressure treated wood.

The world laughed at Knotts, but it also laughed with him.

He treasured his comedic roles and could point to only one role that wasn't funny, a brief stint on the daytime drama "Search for Tomorrow."

"That's the only serious thing I've done. I don't miss that," Knotts said.

Copyright © 2006 Associated Press

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Ever Wonder Why Dub Likes The Dubai Port Deal?

Ah, the Bushies. Dub is one dumb sumbitch, but he's probably nicknamed his younger brother — Neil M. Bush — "Loser." However, the Loser brother is in the Middle East selling educational(?) software to the Saudis and their brethren. Ol' Loser Bush has even made buddies in the UAE. I wouldn't be surprised to see Ol' Loser running the Port of New York for his UAE pals. Yikes! That would be worse than the Dubai crowd. If this is (fair & balanced) fraternal sleaze, so be it.


By now, everyone paying attention to the furor over the Dubai ports deal should be aware of the UAE's mixed record with regard to terror and global security. The Emirates' ruling families formerly maintained close relationships with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, whose hunting camps in Afghanistan they frequented; two of the 20 hijackers in the 9/11 plot were UAE nationals who used safe houses and banks in Dubai; and the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network also used facilities there to mask its operations. Since 9/11, however, the Emirates have cooperated with U.S. operations against al-Qaida, and their state-owned corporations have eagerly participated in American attempts to improve transportation security.

What seems worrisome even to some who might ultimately accept the Dubai ports deal is the "casual attitude" of the Bush administration in vetting the company, as Sen. Carl Levin put it. Considering the history of Bush entanglement with the oil despots of the Gulf, that lax indulgence was bad policy and worse politics.

For the president, his administration's lenience toward the Emirates recalls the unpleasant history of Harken Energy, the loser oil exploration firm that provided him with a handsome profit when he unloaded his shares during the summer of 1990. Years earlier, Harken had been rescued from bankruptcy by timely investments of millions of dollars from the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International, also known as the "bank of crooks and criminals." Although dominated by Saudi friends of Dubya's dad, BCCI was headquartered in the Emirates, specifically in Abu Dhabi.

That may seem like old history, but the first family's intimate connection with the UAE royals has continued without rupture over the past two decades.

Consider the Carlyle Group, the huge, politically wired private equity firm that has employed both the president and his father -- and from which the members of the Bush family and their closest associates, such as former Secretary of State James Baker III, have profited handsomely in recent years. With its sole Middle East office headquartered in Dubai, Carlyle has managed to attract substantial funding from the UAE government, which controls most of the tiny nation's oil wealth and channels that money into foreign investments.

Last year, to cite only the most recent example, Carlyle's newest buyout fund won an infusion of at least $100 million from the Dubai Investment Corp. -- another state-owned outfit created by the ruling families to reinvest the enormous inflows of capital from rising oil prices and oil consumption. If that individual deal with Carlyle represented only a small fraction of the Emirates' investments, the upside potential of the relationship could be far greater in the future. The directors of Dubai Investment expect to invest as much as $5 billion every year for a long time to come.

No doubt Carlyle will ardently bid to manage a slice of those billions -- and the president surely understands that maintaining good relations with the Emirates will enhance the prospects of the family's favorite equity firm. But to deprive Dubai of its $6.8 billion ports acquisition might well have the opposite effect. For a company that trades on its political influence as well as its business acumen, such incidents can be pivotal.

The ports controversy could cause similar problems for Neil Mallon Bush, the president's most troublesome brother, who has become a familiar face in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Neil Bush seems to be in constant pursuit of investors and government contracts in the Emirates, and is treated there with a respect and deference that have always eluded him in his own country. For reasons that must be painfully obvious, UAE royals have been quite eager to engage the former Silverado Savings and Loan director ever since his eldest brother entered the Oval Office. That embrace only intensified after 9/11.

In October 2001, only a month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Neil Bush showed up in Dubai to attend a technology trade fair -- and to meet with Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. While peddling the products of Ignite!, his educational software company, Bush was feted as the guest of honor at a gala dinner for a charitable foundation, also hosted by the crown prince. (Former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, who had been scheduled to travel to the Emirates around the same time, both canceled their attendance at those events.) According to the UAE's official news agency, Bush's discussions with Sheikh Mohammed and with Information Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan focused on "the world economy in light of recent events." During that visit Bush also met with the UAE's finance industry minister.

Exactly how much money Neil Bush raised in the Emirates as CEO of Ignite! isn't clear, but he managed to acquire a local partner, known as Trans-Data Systems, which is required for doing business there. He returned to Dubai in January 2002 to deliver a lecture on educational reform to a "select" audience of 200 government and education officials from the seven emirates that comprise the UAE. The signs of state patronage could not have been more plain. The Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry sponsored his seminar, and the official news agency made sure to note that "the younger brother of U.S. President George W. Bush ... agrees with the vision of General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defense Minister, about adopting new ideas into the existing education system."

During his seminar Bush noted that the "UAE is facing a golden opportunity to lead the world by putting in place a high-speed, broadband access to rich-media content which will revolutionize education in this part of the world." He illustrated this point by streaming a video clip of his son, Pierce, appearing on a television show to discuss his own learning difficulties.

"My father was the 41st president and my brother is 43rd; I think that if Pierce finishes high school, he'll be the 50th president of the United States," quipped Neil Bush. And should he fail to graduate, perhaps he will become a global businessman, just like dear old Dad. Young Pierce -- bearing the name of his mother's family and descended indirectly from Franklin Pierce, one of the worst presidents ever -- must only hope that an indulgent relative will still be in the White House.


Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His latest book is The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal.


Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.



[x Salon]
Neil Bush says Arab P.R. machine not as good as Israel's
By Jake Tapper

In a controversial speech, the president's younger brother tells Saudi audience Arabs must play U.S. media game better.

Presidential brother Neil Bush, while giving a speech Monday in Saudi Arabia, condemned the American media for stereotyping the Arab world and urged Arab leaders to hire lobbyists and public relations representatives to combat these negative images as well as to sway public opinion to a more sympathetic view of Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to reports in foreign media outlets. Bush implied that Israel has done a better job of getting its message across in the American media.

"The U.S. media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims, and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could be influenced through a sustained lobbying and P.R. effort," said the younger Bush, according to the Arab News, Saudi Arabia's first English-language daily. "Public opinion shapes public policy dramatically. It's true in the U.S., in this part of the world and elsewhere."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to comment. Bush, chairman and CEO of Ignite! Inc., an education software supplier, could not be reached for comment. Louise Thacker, the marketing manager for Ignite!, said that he was out of the country and unreachable; she said she could not provide a copy of his speech, nor could she comment on press accounts of his speech. She also said she had "no idea" who paid for the trip. State Department spokesman Greg Sullivan told Salon, "I can't say that we were contacted by Neil Bush's people" regarding his trip to the Gulf or the contents of his speech.

The Jeddah Economic Forum, where Bush delivered his remarks, was called to help maintain good relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which is the United States' second-largest supplier of oil. But -- perhaps inadvertently -- the younger Bush stepped on a number of tripwires in the highly precarious U.S.-Saudi relationship. His speech seems to touch on a number of Saudi complaints, from the American media being too tough on the Saudis, to whether U.S. support for Israel is a cause of terrorism and whether that support is a consequence of unfair media coverage -- by a media that the Saudis continually complain is under Zionist control. In each case, Bush seemed -- if his quotes were reported accurately -- to be preaching to the Saudi choir. And the speech seemed to only underline further the strong, historical connections between the Saudi royal family and the Bush clan.

The third annual forum, at which Bush was an attendee as well as a speaker, was sponsored by the business community in the port town. The area's business leaders include the Binladin Group construction company, the owners of which are the estranged relatives of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who, long an enemy of the House of Saud, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994.

"American public opinion sees Arabs as terrorists and has the desert-man image about them," Neil Bush said, quoted this time by Agence France-Presse. "I wish the Americans would see Arabs and Muslims the way I see them ... but Arabs are losing the public relations battle in the United States."

Bush also suggested that the Arab-Israeli conflict was linked to terrorism. "In the speech, he called for the root causes of terror to be explored," according to the Arab News report, which then quoted Bush saying: "There could be economic disparities, social unrest or unemployment causing growing dissatisfaction in the region. But I have been told that the bigger issue is the resolving of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

In response, James Taranto, a writer for the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com, called Neil "the Bush Black Sheep," and said that he -- like Roger Clinton and Billy Carter before him -- "has emerged to embarrass the man in the White House." Before now, Neil may be best known for his role as former director of the Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association from 1985 to 1988, who was sued by federal regulators in 1990 for the S&L's collapse, which cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion. Bush paid $50,000 in a court settlement.

Since Saudi Arabia does not have freedom of the press, the government controls what is reported in the pages of its newspapers. But if Bush's comments were made as reported, they no doubt found a receptive audience. "The U.S. media has been reporting Israelis defending themselves from rebels disrupting their stability," Bush was quoted as saying. "So public opinion is bigger in my opinion. No wonder the people of the U.S. side with Israel."

The Saudis have complained for years about how their nation is portrayed in the West; this is not the first time that a member of the Bush family was quoted in the Saudi press as apologizing for the Western media.

On Oct. 25, amid reports that the administration was unhappy with the lack of Saudi cooperation in the investigations of the Sept. 11 attack and the war on terrorism (Saudi Arabia had balked on tracking down possible funding ties to al-Qaida, expressed reluctance to help the U.S. militarily and, unlike 40 other countries, had yet to make one arrest, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals), White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush had reached out to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The president wanted "to thank the kingdom for its support in the international war against terrorism. The president noted that he is very pleased with the kingdom's contributions to the efforts, and he said that press articles citing differences between the United States and Saudi Arabia are simply incorrect."

The ties between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family are deep. After the Gulf War in 1992, Prince Bandar had bonded with then-President George H.W. Bush to the point that New York Times columnist William Safire morphed them into "Bandarbush" and wrote: "When Prince Bandar says 'jump,' George Bush asks 'how high?'" The prince donated at least $1 million to the former president's presidential library at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. In June 2000, he attended Barbara Bush's 75th birthday party in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Following reports that the Saudi royal family was chagrined with the U.S. support for Israel, on July 15 the New York Times reported that President George H.W. Bush called Crown Prince Abdullah to assure him that his son the president would "do the right thing" because "his heart is in the right place."

That seemed to be the message delivered to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz -- essentially the Saudi ruler, with King Fahd reportedly in poor health -- who on Nov. 4 took to Saudi state television to report that "President Bush phoned me. He began the conversation by saying that he was sorry" about U.S. media stories in which Saudi Arabia was criticized. According to Abdullah, President Bush said: "'We will not accept this and I will not accept it, and most American people will not accept it.'"

A day later, Abdullah alluded to the Zionist conspiracy alleged to be behind the media criticisms. "Newspapers which criticized the kingdom are driven by people you know and are aware who stands behind them ... God willing these will be defeated." In December, the third-ranking Saudi official, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, blamed the "Zionist and Jewish" lobby for "the campaign by some American and Western newspapers ... launched against us because of the kingdom's position on the Palestinian issue."

Complaints against the Saudi government for a lack of cooperation in the U.S. war against terrorism is no new development. The U.S. government has for years sought Imad Fayez Mugniyah -- one of the top 22 "most wanted terrorists" who in 1983 led the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 16, and the U.S. Marine barracks, which killed 241. In 1995, the FBI learned that Mugniyah was on a commercial airliner scheduled for a layover in Saudi Arabia. But at the last minute, the Saudi government -- against U.S. wishes -- denied the plane permission to land, and Mugniyah thus avoided capture. A couple years later, before U.S. officials could interrogate four individuals responsible for the 1997 truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran -- in which 19 American soldiers were killed -- the Saudi authorities had the four men beheaded. Eleven others are wanted for extradition, but the Saudi government has refused those requests.

More recently, there have been reports that the Saudis have refused to cooperate with U.S. efforts to cut off financial support for terrorism, and to this day refuse to accept that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. In October, Bush administration officials were telling reporters that the Saudi government was still refusing to freeze the assets of Osama bin Laden and was uncooperative in the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. Saudi spokesmen denied those charges as well as ones that Saudi money funds the spread of militant Islam throughout the globe, and that their schools teach hatred and intolerance for any non-Sunni Muslim.

On Nov. 27 White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that the president was satisfied and pleased with Saudi cooperation in the war on terrorism. "The Saudi Arabian government has done everything the United States has asked it to do in the war on terrorism," Fleischer said. He listed a number of areas where the Saudi government -- despite press reports and off-the-record comments from Bush administration officials -- had been helpful, including economic assistance to Pakistan, humanitarian relief to the people of Afghanistan, and intelligence sharing. A few days later, a U.S. delegation consisting of officials from the Department of State, the Treasury Department, the FBI and the National Security Council went to Saudi Arabia to urge more cooperation.

More recently, there have been tensions about the U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia, and conflicting news accounts about whether the Saudis will request the exit of the American military. And on Tuesday, after seven years of legal battles, the Pentagon lifted its requirement that female military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia don black abayas -- or full-body gowns -- when off the base. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was being sued by Air Force Lt. Col. Martha McSally over the dress code, which McSally claimed was discriminatory. Military requirements against female military personnel driving, sitting in the front seat of a vehicle, or leaving base without a male companion are still in place.

Former President Clinton also spoke at the conference, though his advice was a bit different from Neil Bush's. Clinton said Americans need to "do a better job and listen to Muslims ... who thought that before Sept. 11 the U.S. was insensitive to their needs, hostile to their values, beliefs and economic interests." He praised those Saudis who had condemned terrorism, such as the imam of the Grand Mosque, but he also, controversially, urged Saudis to teach tolerance in their educational system. "We see people speaking out against terror ... this must also extend to the school," Clinton said. "You have to help us end that kind of indoctrination.

Clinton also expressed support for a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, saying that "violence must end, terror must stop and the suicide bombings must cease."

Jake Tapper is Salon's Washington correspondent and the author of Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency.

Copyright © 2002 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Lone Star Slope Dopes

I skied (once in my entire life) in Texas ski wear and I didn't even know it (at the time). Suffice it to say that I made it halfway down the Loveland Basin Ski Run in 1963. The details are not worth rehashing, but I rode the chair lift back down to the bottom of the Run. And I was alone on that side of the chair lift. It was a Texas ski adventure before I ever got to Texas. If this is (fair & balanced) mortification, so be it.


[x Slate]
Fast, Burnt Orange, and Out of Control: Why I love Texas skiers
By Alex Heard

If you've ever skied in New Mexico—at Taos, Santa Fe, or a lesser-known resort like Sipapu or Red River—you may have noticed a bit of one-way friction. Texans come here every winter, by the thousands, on ski trips. They show up looking to have a good time, but the New Mexicans repay them by snickering and griping behind their backs. The bitch list contains these elements: They're loud; they're out of control; they get in the way; they wear jackets littered with logos (Longhorns, Aggies, Red Raiders) instead of proper ski attire; the women trowel on too much makeup and screech when they fall; the men dribble Skoal juice on the snow; they all drive SUVs; and they jack up the cost of living because they throw money around without discernment.

This conflict plays out elsewhere in the Rockies and is similar to the tourists-vs.-locals tension on display in any vacation spot. But things are worse in New Mexico, in part because Texas committed the long-lasting PR gaffes of invading the state during the Civil War (they lost that one) and again during the 1970s oil boom (they won, buying up adobe properties in Santa Fe that have since risen in value by roughly 1 billion percent).

I can see why those things would irritate, but New Mexicans' reflexive hatred of all things Lone Star blinds them to the fact that Texas skiers are a wonderful breed. New Mexicans should learn to love the go-for-it spirit of Texas skiers. And at the close of a Winter Olympics in which the much-anticipated U.S. Ski Team came off like a cross between Hamlet and Herman Munster, Americans as a whole should ask if the unabashed style of the Texas skier can be distilled, bottled, and administered illegally with a syringe.

I saw my first classic Texas skier 10 years ago at Angel Fire, a family-oriented resort in northeastern New Mexico that gets most of its clientele from across the border. I was on a long lift ride with three New Mexicans when a Texas skier—red-faced, fat, clad in jeans, a Longhorns jacket, and a seed cap—zoomed under us, hollering like Slim Pickens and not making any turns whatsoever as he picked up an alarming amount of speed.

"That clown shouldn't be doing that," somebody said in a superior tone.

Actually, that's exactly what he should have been doing. A guy like that probably skis once a year, tops. When that's your reality, you have two choices: You can take a lesson every year, eking out slow, dull little wedge turns under the tutelage of a bored instructor. Or you can drink a couple of beers, strap on your planks, and point 'em toward the parking lot.

And, yes, if you do it that way, you're going to crash hard and often. But how bad is a snow wipeout compared with playing high-school football in Midland or losing a bar fight in Dallas? This honorable mode of travel is known as the Texas Downhill, and Angel Fire (to its credit) celebrates it during an annual Big Ol' Texas Weekend that features a no-turns-allowed race.

I also defend Texans' much-derided ski-wear choices, which (while unsightly) make practical sense. Recently, in Santa Fe, I got stuck in a grocery-store line behind an affluent-looking pair of Spanish tourists who wanted to know where they could buy all-new ski clothing for their kids. For just one day of skiing.

No way a Texas family makes that mistake. When the ski trip approaches, they just raid the hunting closet. If there aren't enough camos, orange hats, and Carhartt overalls for everybody, they fill in the gaps with stuff from the gardening shed.

Needless to say, Texas skiers are a boon to the New Mexico economy. During a bad snow year like the one we're suffering through now, their presence keeps our ski areas open.

But I also love them for less mercantile reasons. In my experience, they are—without exception—very friendly people. I started skiing late in life (mid-30s), and I paid for it in the early going. When you're struggling to learn, there's nothing more important than the presence of sympathetic fellow stumblers. New Mexicans acted snooty. Texans shared my pain, and I had many deep, meaningful lift conversations that went like so:

Me: "How's it going?"
Texan: "Woooo. Man. I don't know."
Me: "I hear you, pardner."
Texan: "What I don't like is gettin' off the dang chair."
Me: "Me neither. But you hang in there."
Texan: "You too. And y'all have a GOOD day, awright?"

Just before Christmas, I "celebrated Texas skierness" by driving to Angel Fire and taking a lesson with a group of beginner Texans. They did not disappoint. There was a squealing mom with big hair and her husband's duck-hunting coat. There was a woman wearing enough makeup to terrify a Mary Kay rep. My favorite, though, was a high-school kid I'll call A.C., a huge, loud lunk who competes in calf-roping back home and basically ignored everything the ski instructor said.

"You pull that stuff up on the hill, you're going to get hurt," the instructor lectured.

"I don't give a shit," A.C. happily replied. Before long he was crashing rampantly and having a great time. We should all be so reckless.

Alex Heard is the editorial director of Outside magazine.

Copyright © 2006 Slate

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Dub Didn't Know Redux

Dub and the Bush families have financial ties to the Saudis (and probably their UAE neighbors). What's good for the House of Saud is good for the House of Bush. The kicker in all of this is that Dub was unaware of the port management deal with the UAE until well after the fact. How long, O Lord, will we be burdened with this dolt? Bring on that veto, Dub! Your first veto will be overturned by a massive congressional majority against this "deal" between the U.S. and the UAE. If this is more (fair & balanced) incompetence, so be it.

[x Village Voice]
Dubai's Port of No Return
by James Ridgeway

Don't jump to conclusions, but there are ties between the UAE, bin Laden, and the Taliban.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—No matter what Bush and his supporters say, there is indisputable evidence of tight connections between the United Arab Emirates and leadership of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The country is the center of financial activity in the Persian Gulf, and has next to no laws controlling money laundering.Two of the hijackers came from the UAE and hijacker money was laundered through the UAE. The details are spelled out in documents in the government's case against Moussaoui.

The ties with bin Laden and the Taliban reach far back into the '90s. Prominent Persian Gulf officials, including members of the UAE royal family, and businessmen would fly to Kandahar on UAE and private jets for hunting expeditions, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2001. In addition to ranking UAE ministers, these parties included Saudi big wigs like Prince Turki, the former Saudi intelligence minister who now is ambassador to the U.S.

General Wayne Downing, Bush's former national director for combating terrorism, was quoted on MSNBC in September, 2003 saying, "They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses. One noted visitor is Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktum, United Arab Emirates Defense Minister and Crown Prince for the emirate of Dubai.''

Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar joined the hunting parties, and there are suspicions Al Qaeda and Taliban personnel are smuggled out on returning flights.

Here is one report, sourced to the 9-11 Commission, appearing in Paul Thompson's 9-11 timeline:

"February 1999: Bin Laden Missile Strike Called Off for Fear of Hitting Persian Gulf Royalty. Intelligence reports foresee the presence of bin Laden at a desert hunting camp in Afghanistan for about a week. Information on his presence appears reliable, so preparations are made to target his location with cruise missiles. However, intelligence also puts an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and members of the royal family from that country in the same location. Bin Laden is hunting with the Emirati royals, as he did with leaders from the UAE and Saudi Arabia on other occasions (see 1995-2001). Policy makers are concerned that a strike might kill a prince or other senior officials, so the strike never happens. A top UAE official at the time denies that high-level officials are there, but evidence subsequently confirms their presence. (9-11 Commission Report, 3/24/04 (B))"

It remains a key center of operations for Victor Bout, the notorious arms dealer, with ties to Taliban and Al Qaeda. There were also ties to the infamous BCCI.

As the Financial Times put it, in the UAE, "Western fraud investigators may find a link here or a connection there, with a person suspected of breaking western laws. But in Dubai, and its neighbor Sharjah, trails tend to vanish like wind-blown tracks in desert sands . . . Secrecy keeps everyone guessing—and speculating . . . 'Medieval feudalism' is how one senior western banker described Dubai's style of government, 'with a veneer of 21st century regulations.'"

James Ridgeway is a prominent investigative journalist. He serves as Washington correspondent for The Village Voice, where he has worked since the mid-1970s. Ridgeway broke the story about GM hiring private investigators to gather damaging evidence about Ralph Nader after he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. GM planned to blackmail Nader with this stuff (that never materialized) and ended up paying Nader a 6-figure settlement to avoid a slander suit. The equivalent of that 6-figure sum today would be in the millions of dollars.

Copyright © 2006 The Village Voice

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Say It Isn't So, Gaspar!

Ah, the joy of testing. As a Reader of AP U. S. History Examination essays for the Eductional Testing Service, I have long thought that colleges granted too much credit for AP scores of 3 (particularly) and 4; 5 is the top score on an AP test. Of course, I read history essays. The scores on the AP U. S. History Examination have regularly lagged behind all other disciplines, even the sciences. Perhaps the U. S. history Readers are a better judge of students deserving college credit than colleagues in other disciplines. If this is (fair & balanced) arrogance, so be it.

[x CHE]
Good Scores on AP Science Exams Are Not Good Predictors of Success in College Science, Study Finds
By Scott Smallwood

Doing well in an Advanced Placement science course in high school does not guarantee that a student will do equally well in an introductory college-level course in the same subject, according to new research by scholars at Harvard University and the University of Virginia.

Philip M. Sadler, director of the science-education department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, presented the research this past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in St. Louis. The study is part of a larger project by Mr. Sadler and Robert H. Tai, an assistant professor of science education at Virginia, in which they surveyed 18,000 college students about their science education. The results have not yet been published.

The new data come as the Advanced Placement program marks its 50th anniversary, as more students are taking the examinations, and as the program has received high-profile endorsements from President Bush. In his State of the Union address in January, the president called for the training of 70,000 more AP teachers. And the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, recently announced the expansion of the Education Department's AP Incentive program, which hopes to increase the number of students taking AP and International Baccalaureate exams in mathematics, science, and "critical languages" from 380,000 to 1.5 million by 2012.

In interviews on Monday, Mr. Sadler and Mr. Tai both said they strongly favored a rigorous high-school education, but cautioned colleges against handing out too much credit for taking the AP exams. "Colleges should really reassess what they're giving credit for," said Mr. Tai.

Usually, high-school students who do well on an AP exam use the score to place out of an introductory course in college. But Mr. Sadler and Mr. Tai decided to study the impact of the AP program by looking at the students who still took introductory courses in biology, physics, or chemistry.

The College Board, which administers the AP-testing program, says that an exam score of 5 is "equivalent to the top A-level work in the corresponding college course." Similarly, a 4 is equivalent to a midlevel A to midlevel B, and a 3 is about the same as a midlevel B to a midlevel C in the college course.

So one would think that nearly all the students who took a science AP exam, earned the top grade of 5, but still enrolled in the corresponding introductory science course at college, would ace that class. They didn't. About half of them earned an A in the college course, said Mr. Sadler. And, he emphasized, that was after more exposure to the material. Presumably, he said, if the AP score was really equivalent to a college grade, then they should have been able to do well in the college course's exam without even taking the course.

Over all, students who scored a 5 on the AP exam averaged a college grade of 90 in their introductory science course. Students who scored a 4 averaged 87 in the same subject. And students with a 3 averaged 84. The mean college grade for all students was 80. "It certainly helps," Mr. Sadler said, "but it doesn't help as much as many people claim."

The survey indicated that the single best predictor of college performance in science courses was students' mathematical proficiency, Mr. Sadler said. The researchers also found that students who took science courses in high school that emphasized depth over breadth performed better in college.

Mr. Sadler said the AP exams should be strengthened, either by making it harder to earn a 5 or by adding grades of 6 and 7 to demonstrate that students have clearly mastered the material.

Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said the group was a "little perplexed" by how the study was being portrayed. She said previous research had shown that AP courses are good predictors of college success. This latest study, she said, seems to be "much ado about nothing."

Ms. Coletti also questioned Mr. Sadler's assertion that this is the largest study of its type. Although the survey covered 18,000 students, only 1,000 took AP courses and just half of those took the exams. "Not only is it not the largest," said Ms. Coletti. "It appears to be the smallest."

Mr. Sadler, though, emphasized that his work was a comparison study, looking at the differences between the hundreds of students who did take the exams and the thousands of others who did not. The College Board has much more data at its disposal, he said, but has not done such research.

"I don't feel very good about their complaining about the sample size," he said, "when they have the data and have not done this type of analysis."

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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It's NOT The Economy, Stupid! It's The Culture!

David Brooks coined "Bobo" to describe the arrival of the Bourgeois Bohemian in our midst. The Starbucks crowd, dressed in clothes from a thrift shop and arriving in a Beamer (BMW), was right-on social analysis. As Wikipedia correctly puts it

Bobos in Paradise was a book written by David Brooks in 2000. The word bobo, Brooks's most famous coinage, stands for "bourgeois bohemian." This is Brooks' term for the 1990s' descendants of the yuppies. Often of the corporate upper-middle to upper class, they rarely oppose mainstream society, claim highly tolerant views of others, buy lots of expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be meritocratic.

Bobo is often used in place of the word yuppie, which has usually negative connotations. In fact, even Brooks uses yuppie in a negative sense throughout his book.

Brooks's thesis in Bobos in Paradise was that this "new upper class" represented a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the Reagan era. Critics of Brooks's thesis argue that he did not provide an argument for why this elite was specifically "new," and that the bobo trend merely represents changing tastes and preferences of a pre-existing upper class (not a product of social mobility).

In Spanish, "bobo" is a pejorative word equivalent to "idiot".

Bobos are often noted for displaying their modern anxieties by indulging in high acts of conspicuous consumption. They hold memberships to the Sierra Club but drive SUV's. They "feel" for the labor and working class but refuse to buy American.

[x "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise"]

David Brooks' fulminations have not had the staying power of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, but Bobos deserve a place with Other-Directed People. If this is (fair and balanced) social analysis, so be it.


[x NYTimes]
Questions of Culture
By David Brooks

Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness. As societies grew richer and more modern, it was assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade away and global institutions would rise to take their place. As communications technology improved, there would be greater cooperation and understanding. As voters became more educated, they would become more independent-minded and rational.

None of these suppositions turned out to be true. As the world has become richer and better educated, religion hasn't withered; it has become stronger and more fundamentalist. Nationalism and tribalism haven't faded away. Instead, transnational institutions like the U.N. and the European Union are weak and in crisis.

Communications technology hasn't brought people closer together; it has led to greater cultural segmentation, across the world and even within the United States. Education hasn't made people moderate and independent-minded. In the U.S. highly educated voters are more polarized than less educated voters, and in the Arab world some of the most educated people are also the most fanatical.

All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do not gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values shape economic development. Moreover, as people are empowered by greater wealth and education, cultural differences become more pronounced, not less, as different groups chase different visions of the good life, and react in aggressive ways to perceived slights to their cultural dignity.

Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences.

The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.

The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that capitalism was "human nature." But after watching the collapse of the Russian economy, he had come to consider it "was not human nature at all, but culture."

During the first few years of life, parents, communities and societies unconsciously impart ways of being and of perceiving reality that we are only subliminally aware of. How distinct is the individual from the community? Does history move forward or is it cyclical? How do I fulfill my yearning for righteousness? What is possible and what is impossible?

The answers to these questions are wildly diverse, and once worldviews have been absorbed, they produce wildly different levels and types of social and cultural capital. East Asians and Jews, for example, seem to thrive commercially wherever they settle.

It turns out that it's hard to change the destinies of nations and individuals just by pulling economic levers. Over the past few decades, America has transferred large amounts of money to Africa to build factories and spur economic development. None of this has worked. As the economists Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian demonstrated, there is no correlation between aid and growth.

At home, we spend more money on education than any other nation. We have undertaken a million experiments to restructure schools and bureaucracies. But students who lack cultural and social capital because they did not come from intact, organized families continue to fall further and further behind — unless they come into contact with some great mentor who can not only teach, but also change values and behavior.

It all amounts to this: Events have forced different questions on us. If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.

People who think about global development are out in front in thinking about these matters. (I'd recommend rival anthologies: Culture Matters, edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, and Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton.) But the rest of us will catch up soon.

David Brooks replaced the retiring William Safire as the token righty in the NYTimes stable of Op-Ed columnists.

Copyright 2006 © The New York Times

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Two Presidents For The Price Of Constitutional Government?

The Cobra is in good form with today's skewering of The Dickster (aka The Shooter) and The Rumster. The Dickster's (unofficial) flack, Mary Matalin, told Don Imus that "(Cheney) did what he needed to do." What? Shoot Harry Whittington? The front page picture of poor ol' Harry Whittington in today's Austin fishwrap looked pretty scary. The Dickster came awfully close to finding himself in Deep Doo-Doo (as Poppy loves to say).

Click on the image to enlarge it.
Copyright © 2006 Austin American-Statesman

Now, we learn that The Dickster can declassify National Security materials. This makes him the Co-President without amending the Constitution. Slick use of an Executive Order. No telling what comes next? Dub proclaims himself "President For Life" before the election in 2008? If this is a (fair & balanced) impeachable offense, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Hunting for a Straight Shooter
By Maureen Dowd

Maybe I've had Dick Cheney wrong all along.

Maybe he's not maniacally secretive, manipulative with the truth and contemptuous of democratic institutions. Perhaps he's cruelly misunderstood in his heartfelt desire to disseminate information.

It was at the end of his interview with Brit Hume, when Shooter talked about Scooter, that his eagerness to share important facts with the press and public — a well-concealed trait in recent days, years and decades — burst forth. He pronounced himself a Great Declassifier.

Asked by the Fox News anchor if a vice president had the authority to declassify secrets, Mr. Cheney replied that there's an executive order giving him that power, adding: "I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions." This neatly set up a defense for Scooter, who testified that "superiors" had authorized him to leak classified information on Valerie Plame.

President Bush signed Executive Order 13292 on March 25, 2003, amending a Clinton-era order, to grant the vice president the same power as the president on top-secret material. W. must have been concerned that Vice didn't have enough power to abuse.

(With the way these guys keep giving themselves extra powers, there are probably also executive orders that allow Vice-Man to turn himself into a dragon, become invisible and leap tall buildings in a single bound.)

In return for this selfless effort to tell the world that Valerie Plame was a C.I.A. officer — and punish her husband, a critic of the phony case for war, and therefore a terrorist symp — Shooter was rewarded with an independent prosecutor and Scooter with an indictment. So when the Great Declassifier gunned down his hunting partner, he was compelled by bitter experience to override his instinct to immediately call a press conference.

The administration has been so apoplectic about leaks, I almost forget the entire Iraq war was paved by its leaks. Cheney & Co. were so busy trying to prove a mushroom cloud was emanating from Saddam's direction, they could not leak their cherry-picked stories fast enough.

Maybe I've had Rummy wrong, too. Maybe he's not an arrogant, misguided Robert McNamara clone.

In his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations yesterday, he sounded positively humble. Gone were the days when Rummy and the neocons thought a big Shock-and-Awe blaze of American might would make Islamic terrorists tremble in their Flintstones caves, never to challenge us again.

Now Rummy paints America as backward, losing the P.R. war to Al Qaeda in the first conflict in history using e-mail, blogs, BlackBerries and hand-held videocameras. "For the most part," he said, "the U.S. government still functions as a five-and-dime store in an eBay world." (Hey, didn't we invent eBay?)

Like the vice president, the defense secretary is eager to get information out. If the American press wouldn't scream, "Henny Penny, the sky is falling," every time the Pentagon tries to plant paid stories in the Iraqi press, for gosh sakes, maybe we could have some success in the P.R. battle.

After the Lincoln Group's "nontraditional means," as he delicately put it, were discovered, "the resulting explosion of critical press stories then causes everything, all activity, all initiative, to stop, just frozen."

"Even worse," he complained, "it leads to a chilling effect for those who are asked to serve in the military public affairs field." The press "seems to demand perfection from the government," he wailed. And why do the media focus on Abu Ghraib, perpetrated by "people on the night shift, one night shift in Iraq?" he asked. Why not more stories on Saddam's mass graves?

Rummy is genuinely perplexed about why it's wrong to subvert democracy while promoting democracy.

I love it when Shooter and Rummy call us unrealistic for trying to hold them to standards that they set. They are, after all, victims of their own spin on Iraq. Mr. Cheney thought we'd be greeted with flowers; Rummy said we could do more with less.

Rummy misses the point: we're supposed to be the good guys, the beacon of freedom. Our message is supposed to work because it has moral force, not because we pay some Lincoln Group sketchballs millions to plant propaganda in Iraqi newspapers and not because the press here plays down revelations of American torture. If the Bush crew hadn't distorted the truth to get to Iraq, it wouldn't need to distort the truth to succeed there.

"Ultimately, in my view," Rummy concluded, "truth wins out."

Bad news for him, and his pal Dick.

Maureen (The Cobra) Dowd is the Bushies' Bête Noir. Power to her.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

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David Gregory Bitch-Slaps Scott McClellan (Again)

On the day before Valentine's Day, Scott McClellan (Dub's Press Secretary) and David Gregory (NBC Chief White House Correspondent) displayed little love for one another in an exchange over The Dickster's recent gunplay in South Texas. As usual, Ben Sargent drew another damn pitcher to illustrate the whole awful mess. Click on the image to enlarge it. If this is (fair & balanced) obsfucation, so be it.




[x Chicago Tribune]
No lights, no cameras, but plenty of action at the White House
By Mark Silva

The atmosphere can get pretty testy in the White House press briefing room from time to time.

But there were no cameras rolling in the Monday morning "gaggle'' today, the morning after news belatedly broke about Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shooting a hunting companion on Saturday. The broadcast sessions of press encounters with White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan are saved for formal afternoon briefings, with the morning gaggles serving as more informal warm-ups. And David Gregory, the chief White House correspondent for NBC News, was warmed up.

Why was the White House relying on a Texas rancher to get the word of Cheney's hunting accident out over the weekend, asked Gregory, accusing McClellan of "ducking and weaving.''

"“David, hold on… the cameras aren't on right now,'' McClellan replied. "You can do this later.''

"Don't accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,'' the newsman said, his voice rising somewhat. "Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.''

"You don't have to yell,'' McClellan said.

"I will yell,'' said Gregory, pointing a finger at McCellan at his dais. "If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don’t appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that’s wrong.’’

‘’Calm down, Dave, calm down,'' said McClellan, remaining calm throughout the exchange.

"I'll calm down when I feel like calming down,'' Greogry said. "You answer the question.'

"I have answered the question,'' said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president's office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. "I'm sorry you're getting all riled up about.''

"I am riled up,'' Gregory said, "because you’re not answering the question,''

McClellan insisted he understood that reporters deserve an answer.

"I think you have legitimate questions to ask,'' the press secretary said. "The vice president’s office was the one that took the lead to get this information out… I don’t know what else to tell you... That's my answer.''

Copyright © Chicago Tribune

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More Damn Pitchers!

The Dickster is in Deep Doo-Doo. First, he blasts a 78-year-old Austin attorney with birdshot. Next, he goes the coverup route that would have done The Trickster proud. Now, the geezer shooting victim has a heart attack and is rushed back into intensive care. Things get curiouser and curiouser. Ben Sargent's having a field day! If this is (fair & balanced) amusement, so be it.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Copyright © 2006 Austin American-Statesman

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Dub? The Trickster Redux?

The Dickster (when he's not shooting quail-hunting cronies) and The Rumster long for the good old days. Like Neo-Nazis who long for a new Führer, these evil twins long for a return to the Imperial Presidency of RMN (The Trickster) before bad ol' Jimmy Carter put a clamp on untrammeled wiretaps. Dub wouldn't know a credible terrorist threat from My Pet Goat. Where's Barbara Jordan when we need her? Will Dub's Court appointees step up when the inevitable challenge to these unlawful wiretaps lands on their docket? If this is a (fair & balanced) impeachable offense, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Nixon Doctrine: If the commander in chief does it, it's not illegal.
By David Cole

President Bush's defense of his order authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without a warrant ultimately rests on a claim that Congress may not constitutionally limit the president's authority, as commander in chief, to select the "means and methods of engaging the enemy." This argument holds not only that the president has "inherent" power to collect "signals intelligence" on the enemy, but also that that his inherent power cannot be regulated or checked by Congress—even when it includes wiretapping Americans in the United States without a warrant.

This claim of uncheckable or "exclusive" constitutional authority amounts to nothing less than a modified version of President Nixon's infamous 1977 assertion that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." President Bush has revived that discredited doctrine, with only a slight modification. His new formulation: If the commander in chief does it, it is not illegal. This unprecedented assertion cannot be squared with our constitutional structure, which relies upon checks and balances—even during wartime—or with Supreme Court precedent. Indeed, the Supreme Court rejected this precise claim when President Bush's lawyers made it in the Guantanamo detainees' case, Rasul v. Bush, in 2004. The administration, in short, is advancing a conception of presidential power that finds no support in constitutional precedent: the power to act above the law.

The president's argument, articulated in a 42-page single-spaced memorandum submitted to Congress, is that the commander in chief has inherent power to select the "means and methods of engaging the enemy." That power may not be restricted by Congress, the memo reasons. And since electronic surveillance related to al-Qaida falls within "engaging the enemy," the president cannot therefore be restricted in his decision to conduct such surveillance. Detention and interrogation are also "means and methods of engaging the enemy," so it would follow that any congressional effort to regulate these matters is also unconstitutional.

The argument is nothing if not bold. But accepting it would require overturning or ignoring the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush. In arguing that case, the Bush administration made precisely the same contention it makes now. It maintained that interpreting the habeas corpus statute to extend to enemy combatants held at Guantanamo "would directly interfere with the Executive's conduct of the military campaign against al Qaeda and its supporters," and would therefore raise "grave constitutional problems." Rejecting this argument, the court ruled that Congress gave federal courts the power to hear these cases. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented, agreed that Congress could have extended habeas jurisdiction to the Guantanamo detainees. Thus, not one member of the Supreme Court accepted the president's commander-in-chief argument.

The Bush administration's defenders often protest that even if his NSA spying program does violate a criminal statute, the program is not necessarily illegal because a statute cannot override the Constitution. If the president could engage in foreign intelligence surveillance before Congress regulated that conduct through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they argue, Congress cannot constitutionally limit his ability to do it thereafter. They point to the fact that before FISA, presidents routinely conducted foreign intelligence surveillance, that courts recognized the legitimacy of that authority, and that the Clinton administration itself asserted the president's inherent authority to conduct physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes before FISA regulated such searches.

But this argument reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of separation of powers doctrine. That doctrine holds that the president's power to act is directly affected by actions taken by Congress. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in his influential concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, a 1952 case invalidating President Truman's seizure of steel mills during the Korean War, under our system of checks and balances, Congress' actions are critical. When Congress has affirmed the president's authority or remained silent, the president's "inherent" powers to take initiative are fairly broad; but when Congress has passed a law expressly barring the president's actions, he may act in contravention of that statute only if Congress is disabled from acting upon the subject. Accordingly, what presidents did before FISA was enacted, or what President Clinton did before FISA applied to physical searches, does not determine what the president may do once FISA criminally prohibits electronic surveillance and physical searches without a warrant.

Congress plainly is not "disabled from acting" on the subject of wiretapping of Americans. It has legislated in this area for years, and its authority to do so stems directly from its authority over interstate and foreign commerce. Moreover, the Constitution gives Congress widespread authority to regulate the commander in chief's conduct of a war. Congress defines the scope of the war under its power to declare war; it decides whether there shall be an army and how much it should be funded; and it creates rules and regulations for the army. It has long subjected the commander in chief to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, enacted statutes regarding the governance of occupied territories, enacted a habeas corpus statute that governs enemy combatant detainees, and prohibited torture, among other things. On the administration's theory of an uncheckable commander in chief, all these laws would also be unconstitutional.

Each time the Supreme Court has confronted a presidential claim that the commander in chief can act contrary to statute, or cannot be checked by the other branches, it has rejected it. In addition to the Guantanamo and steel-seizure cases mentioned above, the court in Little v. Barreme, an 1804 decision, ruled unlawful a presidentially authorized seizure of a ship during the "Quasi War" with France. The court found Congress had authorized the seizure only of ships going to France, and therefore the president could not unilaterally order the seizure of a ship coming from France.

And in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the court expressly rejected the president's argument that courts may not inquire into the factual basis for the detention of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. As Justice O'Connor wrote for the plurality, "Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake."

The fact that the Supreme Court has never found a commander-in-chief function that could not be regulated by Congress does not mean, of course, that there are no limits on Congress' power. If Congress sought to micromanage the war by assigning authority to lead the troops to someone outside the president's chain of command and subject to congressional removal, for example, its actions would likely be unconstitutional. But the notion that Congress cannot protect the privacy of Americans during wartime by requiring the president to obtain a warrant before spying on Americans is entirely unprecedented—unless, that is, you consider the bare assertions of Richard Nixon a precedent.

David Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and pro bono co-counsel in Center for Constitutional Rights v. Bush, which challenges the legality of the NSA program.

Copyright © 2006 Slate

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